Reading & Running old D&D adventure/delves... Am I missing something?

[Olgar Shiverstone]

I'll take a look but I am not the best person to ask on that. I'm just in the mood to design some interesting chambers and see people react. Also I know nothing about Mages and Monsters.

But I DO see that you are quite attached to Oakhurst.

Assuming the PC succeed, that is. Saves work designing new towns, plus I thought a sequel was in order .

And no specific knowledge of M&M is needed -- it's an easy conversion to several variations of D&D.

 

[Joe Sumfin]

More tips if you want them.

You have peaked my interest sir.

I am trying to think of ways to add RP and intrigue value in town. Maybe some Strahd spies? And some involvement with that ghost train that goes from the graveyard to the tower. That element is cool but what can I do with it? One of the ghosts is.. someone Ireena knows and .. they can talk? Like the book Dante's Inferno, Dante can pull a soul out and talk to them and when they go back its like they never left..

I'm looking for something for them to do outside the castle. Like I'm thinking of maybe putting some element or treasure outside the castle they'd need to get. I thought maybe put the sunsword outside or the holy symbol that there could be hints to where it is or something.

Since Ravenloft was pre-3.5, I'm wondering how to alter it to account for pathfinder classes. I've found something called Mistfinder that gives an updated Strahd as a level 15? like paladin/necromancer or something and they make some cool tweaks to the paladin class.

Otherwise yeah. Honestly the thing that makes me want to run ToEE a tiny bit more is because its its own thing. Where imo Ravenloft could just be slapped in to just a story your running. I mean "you wake up and are surrounded by this fog that rolled in over night. You don't know what happened but when you walk into the fog you start choking." Its easy to drop in.

But yeah, I'm all ears for any tips you might have. Thanks.

I do agree about the crypts and searching all those rooms. I'm picturing something like the Medusa battle from Clash of the Titans though.

Question though; If its fleshed out a little and not just rolled through, how many hours do you think Ravenloft and ToEE could be played for?

 

[GX.Sigma]

Sure, you can ransack the keep. The DM I considered my mentor told me that as a player, his group had done basically exactly that - robbed the keep blind and fled with its treasure. But if you go that way, the module isn't really any help in that regard. There is only the barest notes on how to run that, as there are in the Caves of Chaos describing when and from where reinforcements arrive if conflict breaks out. There is very little in the way of intrigue in the keep and the whole description of the thing is over in 4 pages. If this becomes the focus of the adventure, it's again on the strength of the DM to improvise and quite frankly, from the way Gygax wrote the section it appears his intent in play is that if the PCs are so stupid as to commit a crime in the Keep then the DM should quickly squash them. The fact that they probably could do so makes any tension about the Caves of Chaos rather unimportant, since again, it's a total mismatch of forces.

I agree. The Keep isn't satisfactory as a home base (because it's presented in such a hard-to-digest, dungeony way), and it isn't satisfactory as an adventure location in itself (because there's nothing interesting in it).

The Keep, the Caves, and their environments constitute a classic 'small world' - which the text actually admits. A small world is a cleverly designed sort of railroad in which you present the world as being open, but in fact the world contains only 1 or a few things of interest, and the thing you are intended to do is brightly labeled with big neon signs saying, "Treasure this way." If a Small World is designed well enough, the players never realize that they are in one or question it. If you give a small world to a novice DM, they'll be perfectly fine so long as the players follow the brightly outlined road, but the small world will be of no help explaining what else is there to do. For example, there is a Guild House for passing merchants and detailed accounting of the taxes that they pay... but no examples of travelling merchants, and no explanation of where they are coming from and going, and no way of finding any of these things out. They don't actually exist in the small world. This is it. You have the Caves of Chaos. Hang out in the small world until you get bored and do what you are supposed to do. Why do it? Because its the only thing to do, that's why.

I think this is a fair criticism to a point--it's not like the little 32-page booklet is going to be a full campaign setting, but it could have done a lot more to flesh out the environment. On the other hand, I think the greatest strength of KotB is that it starts small. It introduces the players and DM to the idea of a small sandbox (the Caves of Chaos), then once they're done with that, they're ready for a bigger sandbox (the whole wilderness). Of course, from that perspective, it's strange that Gygax even put a wilderness map into the module at all, since that's not the point of the adventure (I suspect most DMs just skipped it).

The text actually is smart enough to know this is true about itself, which is why it tells the novice DM, "In fact, before they have finished all the adventure areas of this module, it is likely you will have to add your own separate maps to the setting... You must build the towns and terrain which surround it. You must shape the societies, create the kingdoms, and populate the countryside with men and monsters." Basically Gygax is saying, "Guess what. Get started, but you need to put in hours of work on your own before this is really going to work well." When I first encountered this module as a kid, I had no ability to do that well. The text tells the would be DM to first draw floor plans for all the buildings in the Keep! I hadn't a clue how to do that much less create a network of villages and other encounter around the Keep, and so forth. Yet, I wonder, just whether other DMs figured that out as quickly and competently as Gygax was assuming. I get the impression Gygax's notion that the DM will rapidly grow the setting and the caves and environs and flesh out everything isn't necessarily the usual way that KotB is run. I think modern adventure designers have realized that the general competence that Gygax was assuming just doesn't exist, or certainly doesn't exist without far greater cultivation than the early modules were providing.

Again, this to me is a double-edged sword. I like that it puts the novice DM into a situation where they have to start creating stuff (even the CoC reinforces this, since it can get pretty boring if the DM doesn't decide to spice it up). The problem is more that it doesn't give the DM the tools to do that. The module is not really presented as a toolbox, even though it seems that's what it wants to be. If it had a little more self-awareness, it would just be a generic town and a generic dungeon, and then tons of ideas on how to make it your own, and build the world around it.

As for Adamantium Walls, one of the purposes of a dungeon setting is to constrain choice down to a small set of easily resolved propositions in answer to questions that the DM poses explicitly or implicitly. "Do you go left or right?", for example. But whether you go left or right is not a meaningful choice. Sure, the choice may have a different outcome and different events may proceed from that, but its in general not an informed choice. It's more or less a random walk. In a dungeon, you have to go left or right though. The walls are solid. You don't have a choice but to pick from the a few choices available to you, which lets you right nice tight little modules where you can provide all the possible answers to a novice DM - or at least, near enough.

When I ran CoC for my current group, it had a lot of meaningful exploration choices. Finding (and continually looking for) the secret connections between the caves was fun, and the players constantly debated whether or not they should try "death cave" (the minotaur cave with bones and treasure strewn outside).

I have struggled with this syndrome, though. Do you know of any dungeon adventures that "do it right?"

But B2 actually has an even stronger example of the Adamantium Walls technique. The module advices: "If the party attempts to move off the map, have a sign, a wandering stranger, a friendly talking magpie, or some other "helper" tell them that they are moving in the wrong direction." This isn't empty advice. I had to do exactly that. But I had absolutely no idea what to do then if the players had wanted to ignore the friendly helper. I had a friend tell me that the first time he'd been run on the module, the DM had actually caused them to bump into a force field at the map edge because he was afraid of what would happen if they left the map. A true Small World indeed!

I totally agree. That advice is just inexcusable. There shouldn't even be a wilderness map if the players aren't supposed to wander off into the wilderness.

These techniques give the illusion of a sandbox, but they aren't one. Gygax actually knew that, he just didn't have the space in the text to show you what you needed to do to have one.

The biggest problem with Gygax modules. He spends pages and pages on overwritten minutiae, and skimps on actually making it easy for the DM to run. There's no reason a more competent author couldn't have done that within the same page count (the Caves of Chaos themselves could have been much more brief).

But one thing he does that I think is a mistake is to give no one in the text a name despite the small amount of text that would have taken compared with or instead of giving titles. This is a huge oversight in my opinion, however well intentioned it may have been. The problem with given nothing a name is that a name tells the novice player that the thing is a actually a person. Anything that isn't named is faceless and mere statistics. Gygax I think assumes that DMs will be able to invent any number of names as suits them on the spot, and probably assumed any DM preparing to run the module would just go ahead and invent a name for all the major NPCs before hand. I general, I doubt either is true - the sheer number of name generators out there and my own experience indicates that naming NPCs is as hard as it important. I'm barely able to manage now after doing this for 30 years.

Absolutely agree. As much as I hate the unpronounceable names common in adventure content (e.g., Laraelra Thrundreth from Baldur's Gate), it really sucks to describe a character as "Farmer. NM, hp 3. 30 gp and 4 100gp gems." If the character isn't important enough to have a name, they're not important enough to be described as an individual. That said, I prefer the old piece-of-paper-with-lots-of-random-names-and-whenever-you-use-one-you-cross-it-off method (which encourages spontaneity and improvisation, rather than memorization and constantly reference).

In short, running KotB "right" - even up to the standards Gygax envisioned - requires a massive amount of creativity and work right out of the package.

It's like how MtG starter decks always have a few really bad cards to get players into customizing their deck. When I ran KotB as a novice DM, I found that all the flaws and incompleteness actually boosted my confidence as a DM and made me feel like I could (and should) make the adventure my own by changing stuff around and adding interesting situations. Whether that was because of some kind of Gygaxian genius or just dumb luck I don't know (probably a bit of both). Maybe I'm just a D&D masochist. In my mind it's a classic, it does what it needs to do, and I'd recommend it to any novice DM who just wanted to jump right into the deep end and out of their comfort zone. However, I wish there was a product that did it better (as in, knew what kind of product it wanted to be, and successfully executed it). Maybe the 4eE DMK got closest.

That reminds me, I was going to start a thread about that.

 

[Celebrim]

If its fleshed out a little and not just rolled through, how many hours do you think Ravenloft and ToEE could be played for?

Ravenloft? Probably 12 to 20 depending on the pacing of your players in play and the directions they took. My guess is you TPK before you finish it.

ToEE? I'd say easily 60-150 hours depending on the pacing of your players in play and whether you really took it to a finished state. I've never played it though, so I'm just guessing. My guess is you get bored with it before you finish it.

 

[Hussar]

Just as a point about KotB. Remember that this module was packaged with the Basic DnD set (Moldvay) and there weren't any rules for wilderness adventuring in that book. If you run KotB the way you are meant to run Basic DnD a lot of these issues go away.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

So I only have used the pathfinder system and only started playing a year ago or so. I have not read any campaign books really.

I am wanting to run something though and have an interest in running Castle Ravenloft and Temple of Elemental Evil.

As others have already noted, you didn't pick the easiest adventures.

Time to push my old favourite, which was the adventure I started with 30 years ago: N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God.

Is that how the books were back then? They give you the players and set pieces and you make up most of the story bits and give the PC's good reason for motivation?

Yes, that's the old way. There were even more extreme cases ("here's the dungeon, go with it"). The concept was "adventure provides maps&stats, player (and DM) the story."

So, why my mentioning of N1? The adventure gives you a village as setting/base, with quite colourful NSCs. They aren't as detailled is in most of the Pathfinder material (you won't learn which school someone attended in his youth ) but enough so that you can base your roleplaying on it. Some curious things are going on which are hard to miss and, as soon as the players start looking for it, evil is afoot.

When the players have pieced together part of the story there are two "dungeons" waiting for them. One, directly in Orlane, is some sort of red herring, the other, harboring the evil guys, is where the meat of the adventure lies. It takes some overland travel and exploration to find it (creative players may circumvent the exploration part) and a two-level classical dungeon crawl.

There's a retrospective review by [MENTION=3586]MerricB[/MENTION], which I don't follow completely. IMHO it works pretty well even with an inexperienced DM (like I was). The final fight is extremely hard, though.

 

[Celebrim]

You have peaked my interest sir.

So the weakest part of the module is the hook, but that's ok because hooks really should be customized to the party. What hooks one character really isn't a hook for another. Think of the seen in Star Wars where Luke is trying to convince Han to join the party and he first tries as a hook, "We've got to save the princess, their planning to execute her", and then "She's beautiful", and finally, "She's rich", which gets Hans attention.

For a one shot, you have some freedom that you don't have in a campaign. I'd suggest two things:

a) Start in media res. The campaign start is the only time you'll really get a chance to set the stage as a director, your only chance to say what the characters have done and are doing, so you might as well use it. Have the characters meet in some way while they are already on their way to Barovia. Focus on one character initially, who is in some minor difficulty - late for a carriage, trying to get a room in an inn during a thunderstorm only to find all the rooms are taken, and resolve this minor difficulty by having the character find all the other PCs are travellers who are there ahead of him. Take the time to make the players interact with each other IC. The new PC is trying to squeeze into an already crowded carriage, the inn keeper is trying to convince a PC to let this new PC share a bed with them, or whatever you come up with. The hidden point to all of this is you've already set the stage with, "You've all already bitten the hook" That resolves the problem with the weak hook nicely. In this version of the hook, not every PC needs to know every other PC, which is a nice state to have because introductions are a great intra-party oppurtunity. Additionally, and this is more work for you, each group of PCs can have their own hook - their own reason they are travelling to Barovia. One of them should be the standard letter provided by the text, but customize the hooks to the characters.
b) So keep in mind that the best stories in an RPG involve the PCs being the protagonists in every way. It's a perfectly acceptable hook that Strahd believes a female NPC is his lost love (or even that this is true!), the reincarnation of his foe who is prophisied to defeat him, or his long lost brother, or anything else of that sort. Tightly integrate the PC into the story.
c) The Tarot reading is a very critical scene and it needs to happen to set the story and it needs to happen early. It's quite possible to miss the gypsy camp in Barovia or that the players will deliberately skip it fearing a trap. Don't wait for the scene to occur in Barovia, and don't let them miss the scene. Have the gypsy fortune teller encountered as near to the beginning of the story as you can, and above all - stack the deck. Don't leave the results up to random chance. Deal yourself a few hands before the session and decide what you think the most interesting results and most applicable results for the party would be. If necessary, invent new meanings that you think are more suitable to the story you want to tell with these PCs. Then put the cards behind your DM screen, and arrange them according to the how the players sit, and stage the scene with the fortune teller on the journey to Barovia in the way that makes the most sense to you. I often have her as a solitary beggar woman. Hopefully your players play along, if not, set an oppurtunity for a fortune telling later - with the gypsy camp of the text being your last recourse.

Ok, so the other problem that I have with the module is a typical Hickman problem - he's very tightly focused and he pretty much skips over any transitions or leaves them up to the DM. Just as in I3 Pyramid, the wilderness map of the region surrounding the dungeon is too small.

d) Create a new map around Castle Ravenloft, suitable for a sovereign Barony with maybe a second town (Zarovich?) and a few villages, and room for other stuff if you want or need to add it. Read the section of Dracula near the beginnning where Jonathan describes his journey through the Transylvanian countryside to see the mysterious Dracula. That's what you are going for in this section. You don't want to linger to much on it. Don't make them play out the journey in hourly detail, but do give them the sense of the scale and the movement from civilization to something that is older and less than that.
e) Add an encounter to the journey where the party is ambushed by 'bandits', ideally something they overmatch - 1st-3rd level warriors for example. Probably the PCs will just start slaughtering bandits because they've attacked them (or attempted to), which is fine. If not, that's good too - the PCs have a head start on their role play. If the bandits start to take a lot of casualties, have them run away. If they escape great, you've got a reoccuring NPC. If not, that's good too. When the PC's loot the bodies, have them discover that they are all tatood with a particular symbol, or are carrying a particular symbol that seems like a holy symbol but isn't. The PC's should later discover that this symbol is associated with anti-Strahd freedom fighters who want to overthrow his rule. The freedom fighters have learned the PCs are Strahd's invited guests, and in a bid to thwart him and a bit of misunderstanding, have attacked the PCs thinking that they are Strahd's allies. This sets the stage for intrigue in town.

I am trying to think of ways to add RP and intrigue value in town. Maybe some Strahd spies?

f) So, you need to add some more detail to the town. I'd suggest creating about two to three dozen additional stand in townsfolk. Most of these should be very low level. Basically, there are three positions you can take if you are one of the citizens (or cattle) of Barovia. Either you can side with Strahd hoping to gain his favor and get him to bite someone else -these are his allies that he can use against the party. Or you can decide that the best course is to keep your head down and draw no attention to yourself. These are people the party can recruit. Or you can be one of the few, the proud, the stupid, that decide to resist his evil. As a subgroup of this last category, there are actually going to be a few hopelessly overmatched undead slayers, vigillates, and authentic survivors who've learned how to survive in Barovia. These are potential allies, paramours, and NPCs that you think will draw sympathy, admiration, and even possibly a crush on your fictional character (which is one of the heights of compliments you can be paid as a DM). You may or may not get to use any of these characters, but you need to have them on standby in case the plot moves in an unexpected direction - for example the PCs might want to try to rally the townsfolk to take up pitchforks and torches and storm the castle at some point.

The initial set up with the townsfolk refusing to bury the body and the funeral is just awesome sauce. Go with that. Bring Stahd into play after the funeral with his initial sort of wake up call. It's worth it to establish that there is at least one temple in the area that is sacred ground (consecrated in 3e terms) where the PCs are at an advantage. When I was first a player the DM chased the party to the Temple, and I find this works pretty well as a scene and try to replicate it. You can have one of the vigilantes try to help the party to clue them in, and so forth. The important thing is to get Strahd some screen time, even if he doesn't directly attack the players. Score yourself as a DM by how many scenes Strahd gets to have interacting with the PCs. Disguise him as another character. Have him talk to the PC's from a distance. Have him engage in conversation with isolated PCs. Have him toy with the party or individuals. Never have him stand up to and fight the whole party. Strahd never risks his life. He has all the time in the world - he reginerates, he has amazing mobility, and he's a high level spellcaster with a broad spell selection and the ability to plan. If you are using energy drain, the PCs are dead. They almost can't win, which is why I recommend you don't and replace the energy drain with a more vampiric blood drain attack. You score a point as a DM every time you put Strahd onstage and get to explore him. The exact methodology here is going to depend on the hooks you had.

At some point this plot is going to fork past where I can give you specific advice, both because you've hopefully come up with your own cool hooks and the players will have their own agenda.

And some involvement with that ghost train that goes from the graveyard to the tower. That element is cool but what can I do with it? One of the ghosts is.. someone Ireena knows and .. they can talk? Like the book Dante's Inferno, Dante can pull a soul out and talk to them and when they go back its like they never left..

I've never really done anything with the ghost train, but your line of thought sounds sound. Technically, the ghosts are phantasms and not ghosts but you might want to do something creative with the Pathfinder haunt rules while you are doing Bavaria. Particularly if you've decided to have the PCs be reincarnated, you can have them be haunted just about everywhere. It's a good time to also mention that I favor using the 3e Ravenloft rules for fear, horror, and madness.

I'm looking for something for them to do outside the castle. Like I'm thinking of maybe putting some element or treasure outside the castle they'd need to get. I thought maybe put the sunsword outside or the holy symbol that there could be hints to where it is or something.

Hints are definately in order. You can use the resistance fighters as means of feeding clues about the existance of the sunsword and so forth once (and if) the PCs gain the resistance fighters trust. A mini-dungeon might be ok, but you'd need to explain a) why Strahd hasn't raided and destroyed it and b) why it wasn't breached by good guys sometime in the last centuries. Keep in mind Strahd is a genious and is very much capable of charming his foes and getting them to do his dirty work if he can't.

Anyway, remove the aforementioned green slime and gargoyles that are there just to kill any PCs that try to run away, and reduce the size of the crypts to something more managable. I made a variaty of other small tweaks as well, but I dont' recall them off the top of my head. I'll see if I can find my notes at some point.

Since Ravenloft was pre-3.5, I'm wondering how to alter it to account for pathfinder classes. I've found something called Mistfinder that gives an updated Strahd as a level 15? like paladin/necromancer or something and they make some cool tweaks to the paladin class.

I don't think you need to update it for anything specific to Pathfinder. Gunslingers will fit in fine to the gothic setting if you go that way. The real challenge is going to be balancing things right during the conversion to 3.X. Do NOT up Strahd to 15th level, unless you plan on getting the Pc's up to like 11th level - which is going to wreck the balance of everything else and make it that much harder to convert. The ideal balance is that the party is just below a point where they can turn Strahd (with any reliability). They shouldn't have as much HD as Strahd, but they shouldn't be so far behind that he completely outmatches them. I've never run Ravenloft as a 3.X module, so I can't help with the conversion. Somewhere I have a full conversion for I3 Pyramid though.

I mean "you wake up and are surrounded by this fog that rolled in over night. You don't know what happened but when you walk into the fog you start choking." Its easy to drop in.

That's too easy. Don't yank your players around like that much or you won't have any players. Many players have a very low tolerance for that sort of railroading.

 

[Rechan]

[MENTION=6690511]GX.Sigma[/MENTION] that's a pretty sweet link.

 

[Halivar]

ToEE? I'd say easily 60-150 hours depending on the pacing of your players in play and whether you really took it to a finished state. I've never played it though, so I'm just guessing. My guess is you get bored with it before you finish it.

I ran ToEE as a weekly game. It took a little over 9 months, but that is with significant additions to make the plot a little more cohesive, and with the players insisting on clearing every single room. Keeping it from getting boring was high on my priority list.

 

[jasper]

I only took 3 hours max prep time for Ravenloft. That includes reading it and the card shuffle. My changes were.
Strahd had some of magic items where keyed elsewhere in the module. After all he lived there for centuries.
Removed some of magic items. Any the party already had.
But my group at the time were "here the adventure location, let's get on!" I was also able to force the pcs to adventure at night. This was due to hurting the group so bad during the first encounter with Strahd the clerics had to sleep most of day before they could recover their spell lists.